The life and death of open source companies
lucumr.pocoo.org
lucumr.pocoo.org
Open Source. Company.
These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
Over and over we see the same story playing out. Companies need to make revenues to sustain the employees. Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage.
This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.
My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small.
Some companies are getting boo'd on HN and elsewhere for changing their license from OSI-style to source-available, whereas 10 years ago there would be no source available to the public at all. This is, overall, a positive development.
It'll even be a net benefit since CoPilot will not devour their code, strip its license out and spit (sorry, emit) to anyone who asks the right questions.
An OSI approved license allows building upon that work, more importantly GPL prevents these improvements to go private.
Source-available provides "for your eyes only" view to the code, and is just window dressing when compared to other models.
I fail to see a net benefit, just a staggered backtrack.
these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge.
That is what i associate with any open source company.
It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.
Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
> As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.
Sure, but that's the thing! If you want to call your product open source, you have to be OK with users taking your product, and running it themselves, and giving nothing back. They are not "freeloaders", they are normal users of your open source code.
> It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers.
Compete with them!
PS and BTW you do get something back even from your free users: free marketing and user training.
The issue for me is that there is no term for what we do with the FSL. It’s much closer to open source than source available as it literally upgrades to open source after two years.
On the user definition: open source doesn’t draw a line between an end user and a competitor. That’s part of the challenge here.
> Compete with them!
Personally I rather compete in a level playing field.
You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS
Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.
Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.
What do you think about WordPress, XWiki, Nextcloud, Passbolt, Univention, LinPhone, Element, Igalia for instance?
I don't know the internals of each of these, but I believe they all manage to make money from open source by keeping the free software / open source spirit.
If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.
I agree with this, though excluding companies burning investors money is already raising the bar higher than for closed source ones. Most companies are not bootstrapped and never leave the pretend zone. Of course not a fan.
XWiki and Nextcloud [1] are definitely bootstrapped. Element is definitely not.
Automattic (behind WordPress) has raised funds, also bought back private stock [3], not clear what it means. They also seem to make money from closed source software.
I would expect any of these company, except maybe Element, to actually make money from their open source activity.
When I'm making those lists, I also don't consider open core and/or obviously VC-founded companies, like Mattermost and GitLab.
Side question, in which ways SQLite is not open source for you? It seems pretty much open source, I'm fine with open source software not accepting outside contributions. They still guarantee the important user freedoms of free software.
[1] https://nextcloud.com/about/
[2] https://www.igalia.com/about/history
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic
> Fully employee-funded and pursuing an organic-growth strategy, Nextcloud already turned profitable by the end of 2016
I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this.
It's hard and there are traps one needs to not fall into. I personally think VC money is one of the biggest traps, it's absolutely critical you keep control of where and how the companies is going. If you don't have investors to feed, you may make enough money to pay the employees with a good strategy. You can even manage without open core, which incentivizes pushing the useful features outside the open core.
You need to believe in what you do when you start a company.
I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one.
Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us!
When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this.
It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.
If you are willing to work from home, you could join one from France or Germany where many of them are established, the time difference is small. You get to work in an international setting which is also relatively small size.
When I was looking for a job, I actually listed open source software I may enjoy working on and find who was behind. I ended up running into my current company at an open source event, so you might also want to go to one of these.
This is not very convincing as a reply to the risks pointed out in the previous post. The choice of the word "try" seemingly recognizes the risk of failure, but you seem to ignore the serious consequences of such a failure for founder and employees. I mean, this is not a game.
It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it?
Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.
You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does:
- develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees.
- sell support and consulting on this product
- sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support
Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees.
At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects.
Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.
1. Open source product
2. ???
3. Profit!
Open source isn’t a magical bandaid though it may get you some early traction, the same you can get by having a free plan.
If you develop it appropriately and plan it out, it CAN be successful. But you have to think it out and choose an appropriate license, etc.
Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source; and you rarely can take a closed-source product and make it successful by going open source.
I'm with you on this. You need to carefully plan. I also strongly believe you should not go with VC money. That excludes "burning money and we'll figure it out later". Your open source project will therefore probably start as a side project and/or with government help dedicated to business creators.
> Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source
I believe this too. Now, there are more and more things that require open source products. Open source companies, including the one I work at, have received funds from openDesk [1] to develop a complete suit of open source tools. More and more research labs, universities and public institutions require open source. So there's a dedicated market that's growing.
You may succeed as a closed source company, probably more easily than as an open source company. But the story is not that clear cut, and it also depends on what you want to build and whether you really want to build that awesome product as closed source.
Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software.
No insult taken :-)
Deliberately incurring a high fixed overhead (product development) in a well-understood business model where profitability is highly dependent on minimizing fixed costs is creating the conditions for failure. To make this work you can no longer survive by being merely average at executing the revenue side, you have to be exceptional at the revenue side and most people are not exceptional.
Success in this model requires two separate miracles instead of one. Good startup opportunities are single miracle companies, and you focus all of your attention on creating that miracle. Companies that require two miracles to be successful are poor investments because you now have to solve two hard problems that split focus.
The problem you have is that the barrier to entry for a competitor is zero. Equally the costs for a competitor are always lower than yours.
As long as you are small and niche, it's OK. But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead. Indeed company-B will likely be founded by an ex-employee of your company.
Let's say you charge $100 for support. $50 goes to the support tech, $50 to the development team. Sooner or later a support technician figures out he can charge $75 per hour, and keep it all.
Equally because you currently charge only for services, not licenses, the day support stops coming in is the day the company closes. There's no reoccurring income, so the developers are the first to go.
Clearly the model -does- work, especially when the project is new and things are moving fast. But it's hard to grow.
Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house. Hence various non-Open-Source tweaks to the license to try and take other companies from taking over your turf.
If someone can out-compete you by simply cranking the infrastructure handle on your source-code, doesn't that indicate that you're not using your built-in advantage of owning the feature backlog well enough?
Or, put another way, if the entire value of your business is in your source code, and the only thing I need to be able to compete is your code and some commodity infrastructure, then don't give away your source code?
But sure, if you dont want your staff to become your competitors then don't put tour code under a license that puts that carrot in front of them.
If you're stewarding the project, you have the sole authority over over which features land when. You can prioritise and drag (or even reject) PRs to suit your business case and your customers. Everyone else has to accept features when you choose to release them, or fork.
This is a massive competitive advantage, if used effectively.
The market is proven (and we have closed source competitors). The project is 20. It grows slowly but does grow. It also doesn't need to grow too much. Not every company wants to become very big. In the end, the company is (increasingly) profitable, employees get paid and customers are happy.
> Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house
The company, while not paying incredible salaries, pays decently and offers awesome working conditions. They perfectly know that we could get paid more elsewhere so it compensates by making it enjoyable to work at. And it works, many people have been there for a long time. Some of the first ones are still here.
More critically, the support team heavily relies on the product team for specific questions, and also supports custom projects built on top of the product, so it's not like they can just leave and create a competitive support business. The expertise in the finest details is with the product team and the infra team.
At some point the incentives become misaligned, though, we've seen this happen over and over.
Someone proposes and sends a PR making huge quality of life improvements, it's shot down because it would reduce consulting revenue (the rejection reason is officially not this or not even stated at all).
Someone proposes and sends a PR implementing advanced functionality that the core company sells as part of a paid extension, the PR is rejected (for obvious but not mentioned reasons).
A cloud provider starts offering a service based on the software, the license is changed to non open source.
Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
for good software consulting revenue is not a function of how many bugs/bad UX there are- you consult on setup, integration,maintenance,etc. If the software improves the need for this does not disappear.
If you communicate clearly what the proprietary parts of the software are, it also shouldnt be an issue. If someone wants to implement and especially maintain and test them themselves without paying, they are free to fork and do that.
It works because companies are actually willing to pay a few bucks for some convenience and support.
Of course I would indeed expect a contribution that:
- tries to disable our licensing mechanism in our paid extensions
- tries to copy our paid extension code to our product or to a community extension
To be rejected upstream. But isn't it fair game? They can still fork the code and go start something on their own, it's one of the important features of open source. One can start a new extension repository and convince users to add it to their config, or even fork the product and provide this by default. But this is work, they'll have to maintain this, and will probably depend on us, in the end.
Most likely, we would welcome significant contributions and QoL improvements, we are only so many people for that much work to do, improvements would allow us to focus on something else. If someone outside the company is willing to maintain some feature that we currently offer for a price, it probably actually grow / improve the ecosystem and it would probably be welcomed, letting us focus on other things our customers want. People maintaining extensions or feature for our product would likely be friends. Of course you can't just dump some code and go away, that's not sustainable.
> Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
That may be true. My company reached 60 people this year. Nextcloud is around 100. But not everyone wants to become too big. There are a lot of advantages in staying small-ish. For the CEO, a big company is also not the same fun as a 50 people company.
The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services.
They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins.
Then they complain that Open Source won't let them have those astounding margins.
This is not an issue with Open Source licenses.
We also have this.
> just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind
Yep. Free software was designed with user rights in mind. Open source was then designed to sell the idea of free software to companies, removing the "user rights" parts, which sounded frightening to businesses, focusing on the development model, targeting developers and not users. Free software is defined with the famous 4 rules, open source is based on the open source manifesto, basically a copy of the Debian Free Software Guideline (from the Debian project, which, coincidentally, was closer to the Free Software Spirit at the time, probably still is). They are both about the same set of software and licenses, for the most part.
There's nothing in those texts / philosophies about doing business, for or against (only that free software was explicitly designed to allow selling software, because why not - and at the time, to distribute software, you probably had to copy it to floppy disks and give them, so you had some copy cost to absorb). It's indeed up to businesses to figure out the business model around FLOSS.
But that's true of many things, isn't it?
You choose open source or you don't. Either way is fine. Just take responsibility for your decision.
It's simple, really. I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business... It's not meant for that.
> I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business
Well, life is hard, things are not always easy, running am business is difficult and stressful, looking for ways to make open source profitable is noble, and also investors who "gave" an absurd amount of money want it back plus some more, of course.
Presumably jraph's goal in writing their comment is to convince us that starting an Open Source company is a good idea -- but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned. If they want to convince more people, then they should come up with counterarguments to the top level post's arguments (and if they don't want to convince more people, that's fine too).
No, I haven't succeeded because I haven't tried yet. However, I am surrounded by open source companies that succeeded.
The comment I responded to obviously reasons theoretically, and confuses some things. I will answer two aspects of it:
> Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage
That's not true. You can't just take some open source program developed by someone else and make money out of it. Let's say I develop open source product P. I offer support and consulting. Let's say you want to compete with me on P. You initially lack the expertise and the notoriety. If Alice and Bob want to get support or consulting for product P, they'd better turn to P experts, which is the company that builds P, me. For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing. But while you are spending time on this, I am too. You will also fatally need to contribute improvements to the product you are selling to make your customers happy. Actually, if you start contributing, it's a win for both of us and our companies can even be friends.
I'm not making this up. That's actually where I work.
> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source
So we just countered this. I'm not saying there's no risk. but that's not "by construction".
> There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.
And now we are confusing development methods, not "open source vs not open source". You don't need to be organized in "bazaar" to build free software. Look how, for instance, SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy. They are profitable. They have a "first mover advantage".
> These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
Well, they can.
But my biggest argument is that you don't need to believe me. Many "actually open source" companies have succeeded. So, what gives?
I don't need to actually build an open source company to prove my point. Others have been doing well. Maybe me in the future, that's not completely excluded. Thing is, being employed also has advantages.
>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.
I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.
>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy
I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
There's also possibly a small % of users who end up knowing enough to end up doing "mostly supporting others". They can end up becoming competitors as well.
So yes, this model can work, as its currently doing for you (and others). But it certainly is a lot harder to build, and keep such a business going.
Being an employee of such a business is great. You still get a paycheck every month, so the model is irrelevant. Owning such a business though is precarious - basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.
I suppose something like the ownCloud / Nextcloud breakup could happen.
You need a big enough set of employees with all the skills required (product & customer relations) such that these employees will be collectively more efficient than who remains to be willing to leave at the same time and still want to work on the same thing, and an important set of customers to be willing to switch to the new business.
Given how we like each others and how nice it is to work there, I believe the company would need to fuck things up big time for this to happen. What caused this at ownCloud is a political change (from true FLOSS to open core, maybe other things) and it took a co-founder + a big bunch of core contributors to leave.
I would say, if this is the biggest risk, the company is probably okay :-)
I agree with you on the fact that it is probably hard to achieve this though.
And still, ownCloud is still alive. I don't know how relevant they are and why people would choose them over Nextcloud, I'm somewhat amazed they are still there.
And licensing one's product seems to amplify that risk.
> based on a few opinions of HN comments
What if someone does do that? As a HN commenter I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis.
HN comments (and really all content on the Internet in general) should be written responsibly. I am not saying that GP didn't write their comment responsibly.
> nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved
But then you can't raise complaints when somebody does outline the full extent of risks involved.
Someone not conducting proper research is doomed to fail at building a company anyway.
You should be careful in writing HN comments but you should not feel responsible for a business failing. Someone reading should also read comments from anyone, one's writing does not go unchecked for long on HN.
indeed
> just try
I did say "please" try, the nuance is quite important :-)
You know, I think the views differ because we have two problems:
1. How can I create a profitable company
2. How can I make my open source work sustainable
If you only target 1, open source might not be the more immediately easy solution.
I'm aiming at 2, and 1 is one way to do it: given I want to live from open source work (because of my convictions), can I do it by building a company?
The answer is: it might be harder, but yes.
If you don't care about open source, my comments here are just mostly annoying.
Of course there are successful examples of just about every model under the sun. If you can find a model, and a business which allows externalities like Open Source then that's fantastic.
And yo be clear I'm not saying companies fail because they are Open Source. Mostly they'll fail for the same reasons every other model folks- they don't generate enough cash to pay the bills.
Indeed Open Source can be an attractive start. There's at least a chance of free labor. There's some marketing milage.
The problem is not the start. The problem is when the money starts flowing. When you're "surviving" no-one is really incentived to muscle in. When you start "thriving" then suddenly your space looks really interesting to others.
1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon
2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations
3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services
4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches
In other words, I think the only models that can really work are models where you genuinely don't care about other companies taking your code and using it for their own purposes. (This shouldn't be surprising - that's literally the whole point of open source!)
When I see companies trying something other than these four business models (usually because they desire more money than being a non-profit can offer) I inevitably see companies that might as well just not be open-source companies, because their licensing has to be restrictive for them to compete.
- developing features or bug fixes in the open source product or an extension that are needed now by the customer
- developing a custom project (not in the open, or actually sometimes in the open) on top of your open source product for the customer
- supporting the customer for some integration with your open source product.
You can also try to sell paid extensions (that are still open source). That would be the case for XWiki Pro apps, or many WordPress extensions.
There's another way to do it, is develop your open source and sell your developer expertise for unrelated customer projects. I've worked somewhere working like this, but don't really believe it works well because you are not actually spending time in your project when you are doing this, and you are not incentivized to develop your own product when you do this. You are basically a consulting company. But you can still decide to do a bit of this.
Consulting and support can work for solo developers, but that might push quite some pressure and make it difficult to disconnect depending on the way you do this.
Meta does OS well for their scale. React, Llama, PyTorch come to mind.
For MS: Typescript, vscode, .net come to mind.
This is not open source. (but this does not take out the essence of your comment)
The huge caveat with this is that we often get nice open source developer tools out of these companies, but never good software targeted to end users. So others still need to work to provide open source software to actual users.
For instance, Facebook can open source React because it's something they need, but it would not be a viable product on its own. Releasing it as open source doesn't give them any disadvantage. Similarly, a GPU manufacturer can open source their drivers because this won't prevent them from selling their hardware (and in theory should allow them to sell more hardware).
In theory, I'd expect a printer manufacturer to be able to open source their software, because their product is the printer not the software. In fact, I don't get why open sourcing 3D printer software should be a disadvantage, and the article doesn't explain this.
I agree with your broader point, but GPU manufacturers can't, because then we'll see just how much is done in software which makes their cards better than their competitors, which means their competitors can adopt those software techniques in their drivers. Also the manufacturer may not have the rights to the code in the driver's to release them as open source.
So they invest resources in building the software.
Another hardware company comes along. Their product I'd also hardware. The software they get with no investment at all.
The second company has a strategic advantage. Far fewer software development staff. No carried software investment to cover. Hence lower costs. Hence cheaper product.
In theory company 2 sells nothing because the buying public understand the models, and are prepared to pay a lot more for the same or lessor product.
In practice the buying public doesn't know about Open Source, and the tiny fraction that do, don't care enough to matter. Hence the success of iPhone and the lack of traction for the latest "OSS Phone".
1. Open source is about the code belonging to the community
2. Open source projects can not survive without funding - as you develop
3. So, both (open source and company) can be compatible if and only if funding belong to the community. In other world, if the open source company is decentralised and democratic. And that is what we need to fight for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...
> and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
So depending on whether your source is free as in beer or free as in speech, dictates what business strategy you might have.
Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
A lot of the same could be said for FB.
But I feel that it's incorrect to dismiss Google as being a bad search engine. DDG and Brave both provide !bangs for google and many other search engines that a significant part of their userbase use regularly. I myself use google often when I'm searching for something extremely specific, something that Google may give me 2-3 relevant search results for. Other search engines would often not give me anything relevant at all.
There is absolutely nothing here about open sourcing the bits of code that make them the real money. The business logic implementations, that's what I'd be interested in seeing. That's what we're talking about.
Most of these companies open source because they're great strategies for recruitment anyway. Ie, they get something out of open sourcing these periphery services.
The key is - they are Not relying on having some form of monopoly in regards to such software for their success
Companies also hold their cards close tending to not share their insights, information, and plans.
I disagree with that part. You have the people who know and understand the code, that's worth a tremendous amount. This also applies for new features, who else is gonna be as proficient as your people at building on top of it? Also a lot of enterprise contracts are all about assured support, who is placed better than you to provide it? You have the people that have the best understanding of the code.
Yes, today a bunch of highly skilled, highly trained people happen to work for you.
Tomorrow those same people get hired by your customers, strike out on their own, or join the competition.
All the points you raise are true. But the company doesn't "own" the people, it can only exploit them for as long as they hang around.
I don't think this is true in general, but maybe indeed in many cases. And a non profit organisation would be a better fit(tax reductible donations!), but those are not exactly easy to set up and a project in itself.
You could have said "company" and "made in EU" and it wouldn't have been more or less true.
Open source itself is not necessarily a problem but one over many factors that have there pros and cons. And for one struggling company doing open source there are hundred or thousands of struggling companies not doing anything opensource or benefiting from opensource without contributing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
The issue at hand is more about deciding how OTHER people/companies may or may not use your source-code to suit their own needs. If you decide Open Source, someone else can easily decide: actually, Company (and free labor to boot).
But to your point, in the long term, Open Source is a better prospect (for the people not the companies). Think of all the problems with crappy IoT devices and bad security practices. Many devices _could_ have decades of life left in them, only to be bricked because the companies want to sell newer crap instead (for the companies not the people). And on-and-on.
I think the whole idea of a new licensing model is a good starting point—like a forced NDA to keep a head-start. However, the same problem holds: nothing will prevent someone from stealing the source code either way—one license or otherwise—if it is freely available. But if there is a large community of contributors, the value prospect for everyone is huge.
And, to top it off: now with AI—how can we prevent an AI from rewriting the sources in a way that appears "nothing like the original"?
The business model fails for reasons other than it just being open source:
1. trying to sell open source as a product rather than as a way to sell something else - services, hardware, whatever. 2. being the main developer - and therefore losing the benefit of sharing development costs. How is it a bazaar if there is only one organization developing it?
Successful tech companies don't sell themselves, particularly to has-beens like IBM.
For many tech companies (and especially their investors), selling out and realising a return is the very definition of success.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
Correct. As well as SaaS business models which make that even easier and less dependent on sometimes difficult to enforce rules to make the product scarce.
I genuinely don't understand what the point of bringing up copyright here is. Apart from a tiny handful of materials, even physical products rely on legal protections against counterfeits and knockoffs to be scarce. Why do we talk about software as if it's the first and only thing to be artificially scarce?
The value is not in "a copy of windows" it's that all copies of windows come from one supplier.
Yes there can be competing products, that achieve the same goals, or there may be scarcity there too.
Of course, even when achieving the same goals, some products are more desirable than others. There's no scarcity of OS options, but some would seem to be more popular.
I think the ideal situation would be where you are paid for the development itself, rather than selling the resuling software. Maybe with a pool that interested parties can invest in for initial development, new features or continued maintenance, like kickstarter or bug bounties. But that probably wouldn't have the high margins that the software industry has become accustomed to.
The interested parties in this case are users. They pay a small subscription each month. That subscription pays for development, support, hosting, and so on.
Its the very definition of sustainable because it doesn't rely on "new sales" to fund existing customers. The overall cost is spread very thinly across the ones who are benefiting.
Google releases Android source code. While people would like even more of it released, I can and have compiled LineageOS and put it on an Android device.
I could even go more in and get a Pinephone (I do not have one, but have a Pine watch). From another open source company.
Google released Angular and more OSS. Facebook released React.
Red Hat built a giant OSS business before being swallowed up by IBM - b2b companies to get swallowed up by big b2b companies.
On a smaller scale, Health Market Science released a generic database Java library I used. They needed to write some generic software to use, then open sourced it if anyone found it useful. Doing so did not threaten their business, LexisNexis acquired HMS.
Open source is released within and without companies. Lots of successful companies release open source. Most of what I use is open source - from my System76 laptop and desktop, to my Android and LineageOS phones, to my Pinetime watch. I suppose for people who don't program it the appeal level is different, but I do program.
Then it's good that "bazaar" vs. "cathedral" is completely orthogonal to "free software/open source" vs. "non-free".
Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have very specific needs, Linux is probably good enough. That's true across most of the industry. Most device manufacturers at this point default to using Linux. Why bother building your own OS when the commodity option does the job. It doesn't make any sense to want to compete with free and OSS. Apple and MS seem to continue to resist this notion but they are increasingly exceptions.
So, open source companies are a bit of a contradiction in terms. You invent something, and then immediately turn it into a cheap commodity by releasing it for free. And then you expect to get money for that. Investors get attracted by rapid growth. And giving something for free can produce some rapid growth.
So, they've repeated fallen into the trap of investing in what proved to be worthless commodities. Some outlasted their IPO at least, which makes for happy investors. But those quickly turn into niche products. Because they are at that point commodity software providers competing with perfectly good OSS ones.
Most new closed source database products out there only have a short while before their differentiating features are absorbed by open source ones. Twenty years ago there were lots of new database products. Most of those were OSS. Several of those then transitioned to closed source. But at this point postgresql does most of what used to make those products interesting. And if it doesn't, just wait five years.
The finance model for OSS is very simple. You need OSS to produce closed source software. It's not optional. You can't compete by doing everything in house. So, most OSS software projects are financed by those companies using them the most. Those projects don't fix themselves. So, there are a lot of companies spending money on the commodity stuff they've built their business on. For example, Oracle keeps on pooring money into Java. Even though it is open source. They make money from it elsewhere. Same with IBM. MS is a big OSS contributor. Google too. Every big software company out there. None of them are driven by idealistic motives. This is economically necessary for them to do.
It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.
My workstation runs all the time and I don't care that it consumes this 100$ of electricity a month. Who cares about amortisation of new hardware? New, shiny is new, shiny. There are some large, expensive server machines running my software? I don't see the bill, so the costs don't apply to me. There are dozens of engineering hours required to even partially understand how the final product should look like. But an already well fed software engineer doesn't think that every minute of his life is precious and it costs way beyond the price of his dinner cheeseburger.
Such is the fallacy of "Software engineering is free"
For some developers, if they were not developing open source software for free in their spare time, they would be doing something like playing games or watching movies. At least, when they use their time to create software, they can feel like they're doing something good for other people while improving their own skills - which can translate in better jobs and hence more money though I think most would do it even if that were false.
That has nothing to do with zero marginal cost. The term specifically refers to the cost of producing a new copy of the software, which is so low as to be effectively zero. Almost 100% of the costs of software engineering are what would be called “fixed costs” in economics.
This is to differentiate it from the production of, say, a car, where the marginal cost of building a new Ford Focus is a significant portion of the price.
if it brought benefit to society (at large), why doesn't said society pay for the benefit?
Why isn't there an opensource funding model from society, except for trivial donations that don't move the needle?
Exactly. A 71-line python script https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/3c2e87573d3bd16f6... was groundbreaking when it came out and the fact that it springboarded into a startup is commendable. But 15 years later and Functional Software Inc. d/b/a Sentry has to support 100+ (according to their marketing material) platforms as well as adding new verticals in UX session replay, web performance, backend profiling, CORS error monitoring, code coverage etc. just to keep the growth machine going. That's not OSS' fault.
*: we just recently lowered the window from 3 to 2 years so temporarily the actual time is 3 years for a couple more months.
I can't think of anything that is less commodity like than software. Commodities are raw materials than can be easily substituted. For example Ukraine is invaded so we all switch to American grain. Try switching SQL Server for mysql or changing your Python code base to Ruby. Software is sticky.
But think about libraries. Imagine a library that handles dates and times correctly. You probably need one for whatever you are doing. Would you pay for one? No of course not because this is a solved problem and just about any language has this built into their standard library. You could build your own but it would have no economical value. Because it is a commodity. There are countless examples like this.
SQL server is a great example. Buying SQL Server for a new project doesn't make any sense for most people. The only reason to use it would be that you are already using it or somehow stuck with it (because you work in some place with lots of legacy software). Otherwise, there are plenty of perfectly fine and free alternatives. Databases are a commodity. If you need one, there are dozen or so free mainstream alternatives. The economic value of new ones is very low unless they do something particularly novel. Which then promptly gets imitated by others. And I'm sure SQL server has a few nice bits and bobs that are amazing. But by and large most people would ignore it as an option at this point. I haven't touched it in twenty years myself. At the time we had a product that could use either mysql or sql server (and Oracle even). Mysql worked fine and there was little technical reason to prefer the other options other than some imaginary value that companies associated with it (like getting support that they would never use).
Not because it's a commodity but because it is free. Free because Microsoft or Oracle or an enthusiastic Ruby developer wrote the code once and then it was done. We can then go on and build our layers on top of it without raising a purchase requisition or getting our credit card out.
The reason this can happen is because the marginal cost of software is so low. Microsoft put the work on to create their standard library on the basis that it helped them sell more SQL Servers or Windows operating systems and we all get the benefits because each additional user costs them almost nothing.
At first sight this looks like a benefit to us all but there are downsides as well. If I wanted to offer a better date and time library for .Net then I would find it difficult to compete because the alternative is free even though it isn't perfect.
If you look at hardware it is a different story. I could buy a Dell laptop and it would run exactly the same software as my Lenovo (bar drivers). This looks much more like a commodified product to me.
This is trying to redefine the word "commodity". Normal commodities like oil, grain and electricity very much have economic value.
I din't think resisting is the correct word: Linux could be perfect from the user perspective but not the device one: battery handling in a notebook, good support of certain devices, etc. Linux does not replace the whole needs of users or organizations and that is why MS and Apple continue to exist. They existed before Linux either! The business is not the OS.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/18gdqwd/is_...
1. Prusa is blaming the Bambulab OSS situation, but the reality is that they struggle a lot in innovation, recently. I'm a Prusa Mini and MK4 owner, so I'm kinda of a fan of them, but still... They had struggled to move raise the bar, happy enough to innovate very slowly, with their huge delays with the Prusa XL, and exploiting the fact that other companies were just doing terrible copies. Bambulab before anything else saw that from the POV of technology there was too much left on the table.
2. Prusa itself based its work for PrusaSlicer on an existing open source slicer (written by an Italian guy, btw). While they continue to release PrusaSlicer as a free software, as the license requires to do, what they did renaming the software "Prusa Slicer" is a form of ownership appropriation. PrusaSlicer is a great software that can be used with many non-Prusa printers, my point is just that different ethical perspectives may lead to different conclusions. One could argue that Bambulab created their own slicer instead of just contributing to PrusaSlicer because the naming and the setup of the project makes it hard to do so.
3. Bambulab is also being cloned. The fact that their hardware is not open source does not mean people can't copy the design. The general ideas that make Bambulab printers great can't be patented or copyrighted. See the Creality K1... it resembles Bambulab printers a lot.
4. After Bambulab showed the 3D printing community that it was possible to build better printers, the whole 3D printing landscape became immediately much, much better. They raised the bar. Maybe Prusa will struggle and even fail in the next years (that's my prediction: they will fail, but slowly, since the management is too lacking), but the 3D printing world will be overall much better. In just two years, the average 250$ FDM printer jumped from terrible to totally ok, and this is some kind of value that Bambulab provided, regardless of licensing.
5. One thing that is killing Prusa is in some way they don't use OSS software enough! The future is Klipper, but still they continue with their not-invented-here syndrome to develop their Marlin twist.
6. Finally: using open source does not make you ethically required to open source your stuff. Open source licenses have terms: you just need to follow those terms. If you open source stuff, you are great, but failing to do so does not make you terrible. Remember that in the 3D printing ecosystem there isn't any cloud-companies situation like in the SAAS scenario, where there is a monopoly that allows only a few to exploit OSS value.
Prusa is a standard bearer of the open source 3D printing community and has done a lot of things right and has a lot of goodwill. But they required a competitor to shake things up. Prusa appeared to not be very good at incorporating community contributions, but I haven't really investigated that in-depth, so I may be wrong. In any case, I hope Prusa step up their game in competing and do not fail. They are an example of an open hardware company that shows that Free and open source and commercial activities are not inherently incompatible.
Nonetheless, I bought Bambu Lab's X1C and AMS combo for my business, because I can't really afford to wait on Prusa to deliver their MK4 MMU3 kit. I still purchased two MMU3 kits from them. The irony is that the Bambu Lab printer failed to work out of the box and hadn't worked out a solution thus far, but that's just my individual experience and partly my personal failing.
In the future, I hope my business becomes successful so that I can fund true free software and open source projects so that more of what I used for my business are open source. I don't really want to use a Bambu Lab product any more than I have to. I'll readily jump on open hardware solutions that meet my business requirements.
Bambu Lab may deliver a better product, but at what cost? Always be mindful that these companies are not our friends, especially business that are more transactional. They don't necessary care about the ecosystem at large. If they can get a monopoly, they will.
If you're an open hardware company, be hungry. Don't rest on your laurel. The open source community can only take you so far if you have an inferior product. Not everybody cares about you being open source.
Now, you will hopefully have a lot of community goodwill from being open source. They're your biggest fans and often your biggest customer. If you are open source without being an open source company, you're not really taking advantage of the resources available.
We should fight hard against patents and anything that might threaten democratic 3D printing and manufacturing. Support companies that support the OSS spirit embodied by RepRap. Tell people why this is important.
Let us not forget that the 3D printing business and hobby got started by the expiration of patents and the work of RepRap, the original gangster 3D printer.
That's another side of open source: if you don't rely on it to make a living (though it did help in getting my first job as a developer!), there's that pure joy in seeing your software get picked up and used by others. This little discovery made my day.
I think we really need one or more labels for licenses somewhere in between open source and source available.
(licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Common Clause)
Anyone has suggestions?
Commons Clause is not in that group, as it's not time-limited.
I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years.
> Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it.
Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full rights to do something with it. No legal worries can stand in that way. You can even rebirth a new company from that if you so desire.
I think I understand why you strongly disagree with the label. Those who call your license "source available" without qualifiers are, from your perspective, committing the noncentral fallacy (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-non...). While your license is technically "source available" according to the Wikipedia definition, it is not a typical example of a "source available" license, which usually doesn't grant additional freedoms over time and doesn't become free-as-in-freedom. I don't really see a fix. The difference between "technically category X" and "typical of category X" is an eternal universal source of bitter conflict. The best advice I can give to people embroiled in one is to care less about "technically category X" if at all possible.
Besides inventing a new label and adding a qualifier like "delayed open source", one admittedly unlikely thing licenses like FSL could try is to "reclaim" "source-available". It doesn't have to mean "a megacorp lets you peek at the code if you agree to not use it for anything interesting". The typical expectations of a source-available license could shift to less onerous and less restrictive.
All the adults in the room realise that "source available" is just an accurate descriptor for what they do, but sentry won't accept anything without the term "open source" in it. They view themselves as open source and the fact that they don't use an open source license is merely an incidental thing they do to deal with some of the challenges of being open source. Instead of admitting their position, they seek to change the definition of open source to match what they are doing.
> The best advice I can give to people embroiled in one is to care less about "technically category X" if at all possible.
I think there is nothing technical about FSL being source available. Open source is about being communally built and communally owned. Everyone contributes and everyone is free to profit. By contrast, this is a license where everyone is free to contribute but only the owner is free to profit. The only difference is that two years after the owner stops profiting, the software opens up to everyone else.
Source available is honestly better for everyone than closed source, and sometimes even better than open source. The only really bad thing you can do is use a source available license while misleading people into thinking you're open source, because you are taking their work under false pretence.
Note that I used "technically" as the opposite of "typically". My suggestion is to care less about being in a category you don't want to be in when you are different from its representative members where it matters to you. (In this case the category is source-available licenses.) Focus your advocacy on how you differ instead of arguing membership. ("Yes, we are a source-available license. Don't let it turn you away. There are critical differences between us and source-available licenses you don't like. We are better than old read-only and new Commons-Clause licenses because..."—not literally this, but that's the idea.)
EDIT: having read through the two licenses, I'm actually convinced that the FSL might be less permissive than the BSL in its intended use-cases. The BSL effectively becomes open source whenever owner stops providing the software commercially (rather than 2 years after) which guarantees that there will never be a time where the service is unavailable (if I'm interpreting it correctly). BSL includes a provision saying that a product is defined as competing based on the date of its release, rather than FSL which might allow the licencor to release new services that make someone else's retroactively competitive. It also isn't clear about free offerings, where the BSL expressly permits any non-paid services.
It seems the_mitsuhiko rejects the label "source-available" because FSL software becomes free. That's different from most other source-available product licenses. (I don't have statistics; this is my impression.) In this sense FSL and BSL are similar enough to each other and both atypical. So, if this is the_mitsuhiko's objection to the label, he can credibly claim FSL to be different from a regular source-available license where it matters to him. (As I said, IMO a better approach than disputing the label.)
> without opening it up to competition.
I wonder about that. In many markets you can probably compete using a competent fork tracking a two-year-old version of a market leader. Even integrations shouldn't be too much of a problem if the market leader naturally avoids breaking the API.
It is in software development. You don't even deny that the project stays source available while developers care about it.
> If there is value left
So, once you've extracted as much value as you want from something, the community is free to have whatever's left? I think "you can have the scraps" is an excellent summation of that philosophy.
temporary monopolies are a trivial "solution" for the economic incentives problem, but of course it's not not really a great one. discontinuities usually cause their own issues, and even 2 years of vendor-lock-in can do nasty things to an OpEx budget.
Maybe it doesn't matter until there are more licenses of this kind though. For now, maybe "BUSL and FSL software" is simple enough, since it's just those two.
Should we just expect OSS devs to work for free (or scraps via sponsors/kofi)?
I guess there are a lot selfless individuals who would still use a significant portion of their lifetime to build OSS.
But what about software that needs significant effort to build and constant updates?
I find your view very cynical and I exactly the attitude why I wouldn’t start an ambitious OSS project for something more complex.
If you cannot answer this question for yourself you definitely should not start or participate in an open source project. Is there someone saying you should? GP isn’t.
That doesn’t mean you should agree with him, but when he says “ those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with” it does have a different meaning if you know where he comes from.
Not all software is easily monetized or particularly valuable. The value of standardizing on an interface and outsourcing the maintenance and security to others provides more value than the software itself.
That's exactly what open source is about. Open Source was explicitly invented as a more business-friendly version of Free Software, without the whole "freedom" spiel.
I'm fully supportive of the Free Software movement but if you have to explain the name actually means a different thing than what it says in plain English then you are going against the grain and being unreasonable. You aren't going to succeed in changing the language but rather, you are just going to confuse the majority of people who hear the term in passing.
Libre can work because it shares roots with liberal, but realistically "Open Source" gets the point across quicker, even if it lacks the nuances of the "Freedom" aspect.
Are we totally out of touch? Let my explain myself, the idea that if the drivers/firmware were open source it will make the bet on some hardware safer sounds like this to me, "Someone could get it working and share the code in case the company goes out of business in a few years", emphasis on the someone part, here is the thing, the people capable of doing that is pretty small, I ask myself, for the time it would take to deal with that, I could earn more money in that time that I would save 'fixing' the drivers instead of just buying a new one from another brand or the second hand market.
I know people love the romantic idea of free software, open source, etc, I just want my shit to work well, which usually is open source stuff because in most cases it has a zero monetary cost and people use it, so it gets bug fixes from their own users that are trying to make their thing work. I'm equally happy when the software is propietary but works well, case in point the nvidia drivers, it just work well for my use case, the amd drivers are open, well, I can't use their gpus without ending with a headache every few days, doesn't matter if is open source or not, it needs to work well.
Back to my point, even for the power users, how many people will actually fix the drivers/firmware of some hardware they bought? We are in a position in life that is cheaper to just buy new hardware and use that time to learn new things that will pay more in the long term and I personally find we, the linux community are out of touch most of the time with what most people care about.
Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back', but OSS allows anyone to use it, so why wouldn't they? Do you want to be a company that is 100% OSS? That's cool, just don't make the pikachu face when another company enters the market and use what have build and shared.
That is the point of Open Source, but it is not the point of Free Software. Specifically -- and I know this was addressed in the article -- this is why AGPL should be what programmers are using. It doesn't discriminate, but it does make sure that any entities that use Free Software contribute back to the commons.
This bears repeating again and again; this is why copyleft exists.
> The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term.
Source: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
A competing vendor could offer the software verbatim and still profit due to marketing and network effects (AWS has multiple products that work better together than using disparate vendors for each product), and AGPL would not help in that case.
Assuming you meant Linux kernel specifically, I think you are out of touch how "the linux community" works. Absolute majority of participants are paid by corporations and do what their managers tell them to do. Nobody is just looking to randomly (and for free) improve things average Windows normie would care about.
The FSL is interesting because it correctly assumes the existence of parasites, ie 'harmful free-riders'.
There are ofc too many projects doing what is in effect free R&D for larger entities... these free riders having zero interest in the health or longevity of open technical ecosystems, so game theory is the right lens, I think.
I'd be very interested to learn of any other proposed structures along the lines of the FSL: particularly if anyone here has opinions on/ direct experience with them!
---
Earlier incarnation/s of this approach are mentioned on the FSL page.
Open Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model BUSL https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ FSL https://fsl.software/
Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutting them on hardware costs. Now that Prusa is non-free, they have lost both the price, the hackability, and the moral advantage. It's an utterly braindead move. If Prusa were smart they would be looking for ways to reduce production costs to get down to similar price points, investing in usability improvements, and doubling down on the free software approach. Let's face it, Prusa got complacent and someone at their lunch.
You can monetize free software without breaking the social contract. I'm quite fine with your licensing approach with FSL, but it's not free software nor open source, and it does not align with the social contract, and that's all well and good so long as you can acknowledge that -- and live with the consequences, such as heavily disincentivizing third-party contributions. But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake. Honestly, I'm glad that FSL is working out for you, but by no means does it justify some call to action to water down FOSS nor is it indicative of some fundamental problem with FOSS.
That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a better name tbh) synonymous with 3D printing, and developing a product line which covers a wider range of needs, from entry-level highly-usable stuff up to hackable mid-tier things and possibly high-end workshop printers as well, all of which should have had a shared brand identity. China can't really compete on reputation, so that's where to focus. Moreover, they could have invested more in services surrounding the product, such as the aforementioned cloud printing services, perhaps a thingiverse-equivalent with a models marketplace and a small margin off of that, etc. Auto-detect when your filament is running low and have a subscription service to ship you a new one -- maybe the cloud printer notices when you don't have enough in stock for a model you want and suggests you order more.
Just making a new model every 2 or 3 years and hoping China wouldn't notice was a very stupid strategy, and the free or non-free nature of their firmware has nothing to do with that.
This is such a common failure mode in open source companies -- they think that the code is 90% of the battle for the market. It's not, it's more like 5% at best and because it's open source the rest of the market can make use of it. This can be very powerful if you're smart about it, but "write the code and the rest will work out" is not that.
none of those plans would work - at best they're a gamble.
> China can't really compete on reputation
nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies.
The only thing that china cannot clone is technology they cannot get access to - such as high tech semi conductors, and that's thru a lot of losses copped by the shareholders by fiat from the US gov't.
Western manufacturing is at odds with China for the reasons you stated, but free software eliminates this competitive advantage entirely and you need to plan for your output to be reused by your competitors as a fundamental part of your business model.
I’m not convinced that this is true. DJI, Roborock, Dreame, Xiaomi are all brands that compete to some degree on brand reputation.
I don’t have an opinion on that. I know that Prusa is clearly keeping some firmware closed (for now?) that they previously developed in the open. They also talk about their disadvantages of being open. Does it change the undercutting? Probably not, but I don’t believe that many more Open Source players will enter the race now.
> But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake.
Our funding did not motivate the license change. I can say this with clean conscience. I understand that I have biases here but I also do not want Open Source to turn into something that is exclusively for plumbing.
I don’t want Sentry to be my last adventure and I also don’t want to give up on Open Source. But I don’t know a better way either. When I start something new I’m not sure I’m any more the wiser when it comes to balancing Open Source and commercial interests.
Here's the thing: you are no longer working in open source. If that's right for your product and your company, then so be it, I wish you success. FSL is an interesting development in this space. But, you opted out. You did give up on open source. Okay, fair enough, but to square your conscience I think you need to acknowledge that.
If you want to chat a bit more about the problems of open source and commercialization, share your insights from Sentry, and hear some thoughts from someone who might have done differently, feel free to send me an email, sir@cmpwn.com. Would be interested in talking about it with you further.
That’s just not true. I personally and Sentry too write open source software every day. Not every thing we create is FSL licensed.
But I will take you up on the offer.
How on earth is anyone supposed to compete with near slave labor in China?
And, to be honest, Chinese manufacturing is not the open slave market it used to be. They've cleaned up their act quite a lot, and the quality of life in Shenzhen isn't that bad. China isn't winning just because they have cheap labor, but also because they have made numerous innovations and smart investments in manufacturing. The poverty rate is only 6% higher in Shenzhen than in San Francisco.
I would argue that was always inevitable, Prusas are laughably overpriced and it's not like they're open source in the sense that you can build your own. They took the RepRap idea and commercialized it with an insane markup, benefiting from open source much more than Bambu probably did. For the longest time their PrusaPrinters model hosting site only supported .gcode files for their printers which was just a large fuck you to anyone with any other printer. Hence why Thingiverse ran circles around them with a half broken site.
There is a lot more community value in providing hackable low cost hardware like Creality did with the Ender, becase then people that have time but not money can you know... buy it. And then develop open source software or make models for it with that time.
That's what most users care about. That it just works and it does that at an attractive price point.
The rest is ideology and politics, which is fine if it's what you are into, but most people won't care.
Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down.
If I understand TFA correctly, I can buy a largely equivalent model with closed firmware at 1/3 the price, or a better one at 1/2 the price. Choosing the closed firmware one would be a no brainer for me. Edit: Rereading the passage, it seems even the 1/3 price model is better.
Most don't need updates to remain functional, but this is still a very immature and rapidly evolving industry. The quality difference in the last two years is significant and a lot of the advances are in firmware, not just hardware. The difference between old and new firmware could be a higher quality print in half the time.
Au contraire - caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road is ideology. And wanting anything done about it is politics.
If you call yourself an "Open Source Company" and you are not an Open Source Company, then yeah, people will criticize you for it. No, that's not a sign that the world is evil to you or that Open Source does not work or anything else. It's just that you lied to people, and you're not getting applause for that. Deal with it.
Ultimately, all of these stories come down to this: There's a company that really would like to get the positive image of Open Source, but on the other hand, really would like to have a business model that's incompatible with Open Source. So they want both, they can't have that, then they try to have both, and then they complain that they can't have it.
Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. Of course, adding monetary incentives opens a whole new can of worms, so maybe the current situation is the best we can do after all. I suspect that many good qualities of open source software come from lack of money involved - there is no telemetry, no dark patterns to keep you using it, no attempts at vendor lock-in.
This is exactly what the Free Software world needs, IMO. More specifically, it needs to be trivially easy to use and built into the distro - i.e. you have a utility that keeps track of what you desktop apps etc you use, asks priorities+budget then generates a breakdown of how much money to send each project. Then it lets you one-click pay, instead of having to individually go to all the websites and donate to each.
Free Software can't be gratis, if we ever want it to be sustainable and prioritize the user.
In my personal encounters there are usually tons of confusion between FOSS, OSS and source available. My gut feel is that there's some degree of exploitation of the mix ups and most turn a blind eye to the underlying issues.
Firstly finding the point of leverage (was distribution, now is?)
Secondly looking at Game theory, the Tit for Tat approach is simple and consistently useful and well understood - so some ability to "hit back" is very useful. This of course depends on common legal frameworks which is part of the problem but ...
When you get started in open source, it's a great way for a small team to get the word out. Conversely, when starting as proprietary software or SaaS, you're looking at advertising, websites, sales calls and so forth. If an open source company is lucky enough to be successful, the next phase is having users and perhaps even funding. When the team grows and/or others put their own money or career into the company, they want an outcome. It becomes hard to ignore that there are thousands of people using the software and inevitably it becomes an exercise on how to claw back from the group of "free" users. There is also the fear that a big company will undercut the open source company by offering the software as part of a cloud service. This is my opinion on how we got here with confusing licensing changes.
Most don't have the means to accept little to no income from their work. But there shouldn't be a "fixed pot" mentality. In order to be a successful open source company, one has to see the "free" users as beneficial. Think of it as a big wide open world and that while some will never pay, if you add value in other ways on top of your open source offerings, there will be significant income opportunities. Could be consulting projects, hosted/cloud/SaaS versions or specialized components.
One should also look at operations. There will be a new wave of companies, especially in the AI space, that are lean and using automation to build great things with a very limited amount of resources. Perhaps they don't even need funding and can build a profitable company without it. In those cases, they won't have those internal pressures and hence likely to be more competitive. Something to watch in 2024.
Most consumers are price sensitive instead of closed/open source sensitive.
If Meka was cheaper, they would win.
I think the key point is that the FSL is necessary when profit is required. The GPL is a philosophy of social distribution more than a way to build a capitalist enterprise. Using GPL software ensures that software stays socially distributed instead of privately; but that can lead to issues for private profit.
A little bit helps the sand stick together. Too much and goodbye castle.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that trying to build a capitalist open source company is like trying to build an ant hill out of insecticide. FOSS software, at least in my eyes, is a tool to help achieve the ultimate goal of toppling capitalism. I love it when people try to make it compatible with capitalism, since it helps further the goal.
If you want to work at a truly open source company, it should probably be a non-profit foundation of some kind.
If you grow up programming, you are privileged: you are intelligent enough to create something complex, useful, and are probably competent enough to get a job whose starting salary is likely twice that of the average person. As an intelligent person, you may believe in a world run by logic and merit. The code either works or doesn't, has bugs or doesn't, looks clean or doesn't. You write good code, you get paid lots of money.
On top of all this, as you write code, you learn that there is a collection of people on the internet who have certain values and principles, and that you are actually using their work, for free, basically out of nothing but good will. This is inspirational, so you decide you will dedicate your life to the same. However, making something for free and giving it away means you can't pay for Mountain Dew. So you decide to make a company, so you can make and give away the code, and still make money.
There's a problem, though. So far you are still thinking like a privileged programmer. But [capitalist] business requires a different mindset. The values and principles of business are not those of the noble engineer. Business values profit, and its principles are based on solving a problem for a customer. But more than anything, business demands the will to compete, at any cost. This is dog-eat-dog. There's no room for generosity, unless you're already winning, and the generosity is ensuring you'll keep winning.
An "Open Source Company" is, by definition, nonsense. It's trying to combine two completely ideologically separate things, having both cakes, and eating them too. Sure, you can have a business that also makes open source. But your business can't be dependent on that open source to make a profit. If it does, then eventually you will have to come out from your shelter and get wet, or you will lose the business, and possibly the code too.
Most of the people in the world don't care about the values and principles of open source. They care about solving the many problems they have every day, so they can feed and shelter their families and still have some leisure time. Most people don't care about your software license. They just want to use a product that makes their life easier. And that's what a business is supposed to do. Open Source is a distraction from that aim. If you really want to solve someone's problem, do that first. Later, once you are very rich and successful, and have many different aspects of the business that generate profit, then you can release your code for free, without it becoming a distraction.
The people who value open source code may not like that your code is closed. But they will respect your honesty, and a product that solves a problem well. And you get to make something you like making, and solve problems, and feed and shelter your family.
The only problem is I don't think the 2 year term is sufficient to stop free-riding, and that probably requires adjustment on a per-project basis.
It's not like Jeff couldnt invest to make better software than elastic. They have the money. Theyd just rather feast off Elastic's plate until Elastic is dead.
It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction.
Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.
May Amazon feast on their rotting open and free corpse, eh?
I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. He's pointing out correctly that they were well resourced, and had built a $.628 Billion revenue business (at the time). Well done.
Incidentally Since the change, they've grown to just north of $800M, so Elastic is still growing, but that growth is significantly slower than in years prior, so evidence supports Drew's assertion. Had Elastic done something different, they may have had more or less success.
Perhaps you missed the part where he tried to imply that they were swimming in profit by stating their revenue and sweeping the cost of paying for the development of this software under the carpet.
Chasing 10x is a choice, not a force of nature.